Thursday, March 28, 2024

Rise of the Machines

The opening shots in the Humans versus Robot Dogs war have been fired in Massachusetts:
Moreira was barricaded inside a home on St. Francis Circle after a 911 call about a person holding someone else at knifepoint, police said at the time. The person escaped, but when officers arrived, at the home, Moreira allegedly opened fire on a SWAT vehicle and periodically shot near the officers who’d circled the home.

State police eventually decided to send in three robots, including Roscoe, to find where in the building Moreira was holed up. Roscoe cleared the top two floors of the building, then discovered him, holding a rifle, in the basement, police said.

He knocked the robot dog down, then started to walk up the stairs, but, when Roscoe righted itself and started following him up the stairs, he knocked the dog over again, then shot it three times. Its pilot lost communication with the dog.

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What I'm Reading...

I'm about finished with Kara Swisher's Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. She's been covering the Silicon Valley beat since before most of today's tech giants were even startups and she's kept allll the receipts. This book is a hell of a purse dump, let me tell you.



Hey, look!

Gaston, who passed away recently, was not a gunsmith by training or avocation, but it would not be out of line to say that he’s had as large an effect on the handgun market as such enduring legends like Sam Colt and John Moses Browning.

Controversial? Yup. Aesthetically challenging? Perhaps. The Glock G17 nonetheless transformed and—with the expiration of early patents—continues to transform the defensive-handgun market, like it or not.


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Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Every Picture Tells a Story

Look, I don't have much of a hard time believing that some percentage of stolen or illicitly purchased handguns in the US are finding their way to Haiti, but something like ninety percent of the long guns I'm seeing in photos there are your typical run-of-the-mill Third World Kalashnikov variants.

Which made the photo here interesting:


I'd bet lunch money that that's a picture of the BBC photo stringer's hired private security contractor. I'll bet it got wired to London in a big batch of photos from the current unpleasantness and someone in editorial or the design department (I don't know the exact online workflow at the Beeb, sorry) thought "Ooh! This one looks dramatic!" without understanding what they were looking at, and used it.

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Meme Dump...




That didn't take long.

The usual suspects are already in full "ship fuel can't melt steel beams" mode at Gab 2.0, I see.



Tab Clearing...



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Monday, March 25, 2024

Time flies like a jet fighter...

I was really not ready for all these fighter planes that were the New Hotness in the mid-late Seventies to be celebrating a half century of flight.

This time it's the Tornado, still in service with the Luftwaffe. I was six when the first prototype flew, and in middle school when they went operational with the Jerries.



I LOL’ed

I saw someone online refer to Candace Owens as “Canned Ass Owens” and it caused me to express mirth audibly.

Look, you don’t pick messy public feuds with the boss, and no single employee is more important than the organization. Start thinking like that and next thing you know you’ll be doing “documentaries” about testicle-tanning on Xitter.

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Ignorance is no excuse, they say…

I just closed a column with the sentence “Know the law, so the law doesn’t get to know you” and I could have kept going for another thousand words.

For instance, there are a lot of very pro-2A states with very relaxed, liberal handgun carry laws that, at the same time, have strict prohibitions against loaded long guns in vehicles.

This isn’t an “anti-gun” thing, it’s the result of the state having a strong hunting culture and therefore having laws intended to thwart poaching and “road-hunting”.

This is the kind of thing folks need to be aware of on roadtrips. Don’t just glance at your handy CCW reciprocity map and think that it’s an indicator of the entire regulatory climate along your route.

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Sunday, March 24, 2024

Finding the Dot


Gideon Optics sent one of their Judge mini red dots to mount on the Taurus 327 Defender TORO, so we'll see how it does when screwed to the topstrap only an inch or so away from the 40,000 psi detonations of full house .327 Federal Magnum loads.

Of course, revolver duty is actually a lot kinder than the whiplash these optics experience when mounted on the reciprocating slide of a self-loading pistol.

I've been using a dot-sighted revolver for about a year now, and I had to learn a different technique of finding the dot than the one I have used for years with semiautos, but that's gonna take a whole post of its own...

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Saturday, March 23, 2024

Friday, March 22, 2024

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #252...


You know how I know that I've been living in plastic pistol land for a long, long time? The Walther PDP Steel Frame Compact test pistol arrived for a Shooting Illustrated review and I was like "Jeezis this thing is a boat anchor. How the hell is anyone supposed to carry this?"

I threw it on the scale and it weighed in at a hair over two pounds, six ounces. You know what else weighs a hair over two pounds, six ounces? The Smith & Wesson 5906, as do the various full-size steel 1911s that I carried every day for something like ten years. 

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Hey, look!

My review of the Girsan MC 14T is online now. The 14T is a blowback .380 with a tip-up barrel that's derived from the Beretta Model 86, albeit with some significant improvements. You should go read about it!



Make your answer in the form of a question.

You know, in retrospect I'm kinda sad that we didn't get more Aaron Rodgers as a host on Jeopardy!, especially as his orbit has gotten increasingly far out there.

Can you imagine this?
Contestant: "I'll take 'People Who've Walked on the Moon' for $400, Aaron."

Aaron: "It's a hoax, you sheeple!"

Contestant: "Okay, then, give me 'Famous Vaccine Inventors' for $200?"

Aaron: "AAAARGH!!!" *rips up note cards*
Later:
Aaron: "And for Final Jeopardy, 'The water is turning the frogs' this. You have thirty seconds." 

Music: 🎶 Doo-do-doo-do... 🎶


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